[Announce] dia 0.90 is released !

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Hello all,

  Just a short note, to tell the world and even outer planets if they bother
to pay attention, that dia 0.90 final is out !

It should reach its main distribution site, 
        http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/dia/
in the next couple {minutes|hours} depending on the load of the GNOME
FTP file-moving daemons. In the mean time, it is also located 
at the same place as the release candidates.

Final is identical to yestermorning's CVS, which was identical to RC3 save
for a couple Makefile fixes.

I'm not very good at making speeches, even worse at making speeches in
e-mail form, but I would like to congratulate and thank our previous
maintainers, Alex Larsson, and James Henstridge, who are now busy in other
(neighbouring) parts of the software galaxy. James passed the torch to Lars
Clausen and myself for the 0.90 release. Before that, he did a lot for the
project, and steered it towards the success it enjoys today!

So, now dia doesn't have one maintainer, but two; by working as a pair, we 
hope to react to changes in our Real Life workload better than either of us 
would have. Of course, we are not alone: Hans Breuer (win32) and Steffen
Macke (win32 installer) are still on board (I hope they'll find this a fun
activity for a long time), and we of course welcome newcomers and less
formally active but very present people who frequent the mailing list.

Wow, it's fortunate I warned people I'm bad at speeches. 

Here is what I suggest for the next two weeks:

        * for the first week (starting now), I would like to cautiously lift
the freeze which has been informally in force for the last (wow) two months.
During this week though, I would like we remain capable to issue a new
release with a very short notice (a brown-bag release). People will really
mock my being traumatised by #52836, but we still get a half-dozen duplicates 
a week... I don't want to let an issue of this kind in the future.

        All the things which fix critical and non-critical details, but don't 
introduce a big feature or change an established behaviour are fine for that 
period, IMO. I'm thinking about the non-freetype font menu hack for small 
screen/fontful systems describe well the kind of patches I'm talking about.

        * assuming 0.90 passes one week with no huge problems, we could
probably open the floodgates to semi-revolutionary things. There are at
least two plug-ins waiting for detailed review and perhaps inclusions; we
had last week a discussion about a print-time poor man's font matcher to
handle EPS export in Simplified Chinese, I would like to code and merge this
before it goes on my /dev/womdisk swapfile. You see what.

        * starting June 15-20, I would like to start a short 0.91.RC#
campaign with the new stuff in, to be released in the beginning of July.
If things go well, and people agree with me, 0.91 would be the basis for 
starting the migration towards gtk2.0/GNOME2 (the rule "it ain't exist if it
ain't in sid" is still the primary guideline I follow).

Of course, we are all humans, I'm a specially lazy human, and this will
probably be amended by practice.

I will try to make a gnotice and a freshmeat announcement sometime this
evening.

        -- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.